Friday, February 18, 2022
3:40 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
It’s weird to even write “Mae Sot” above. I worked so long on my little video projects yesterday that I never once even stepped outside this room. I’ve been doing that so often lately that I occasionally get confused about where I am. I momentarily forget that I’m in Mae Sot. I have so little to do with the city itself lately. And on a fasting day, that tendency is exacerbated because I don’t even need to go outside to get a meal.
I did complete a short version of the Pai Canyon video. I was somewhat pleased with it, and I uploaded it to YouTube. I decided to post it first. And I’ll post the “extended cut” today or tomorrow. Judging by the response of the world, it was a mistake. At the moment, this video has been viewed 545 times. And that’s nothing at all. I don’t dive into all the statistics that YouTube provides. There is no reason to worry about the stats when your videos are so unpopular to begin with. People tend to get crazy when it comes to YouTube stats. They’ll analyze where their viewing traffic is coming from and at what time of day and they’ll use all this information to change their video style. But these people often get perhaps ten or fifteen views of one of their videos. With such a low number, the stats are meaningless. If they want more people to watch their videos, the answer is obvious: make better videos. You don’t need statistical analysis to tell you that. If only 545 people watched my video of the Pai Canyon, that means it is a boring video. It doesn’t mean it is a bad video. It’s important to make that distinction. It could be quite a good video or an average video. But it’s clearly not popular with the general population.
However, it’s difficult to draw any real conclusions. After I posted that video, I was curious about other videos about the Pai Canyon. Tens of thousands of foreigners visit that canyon every year (at least before the pandemic), so there are a lot of videos about it on YouTube. And when you scan them all, you quickly see that even getting 500 views is an achievement. A lot of people posted videos of their experiences there years ago and these videos have been watched twenty or thirty times in total.
Interestingly, a few days ago, I posted an hour-long video that consisted of me just drinking coffee and talking. And that video currently has over 2,000 views. People really like it. I think the idea is that people are drawn to personal stories. The Pai Canyon video was about the Pai Canyon. It’s an interesting and beautiful place. But it’s still just a place. People care about stories about people. The more you put yourself into one of these videos, the more people can relate to it.
My next video project is going to be another complex one. The day after I visited the Pai Canyon, I went to three places. I went to the Pai Memorial Bridge, to a famous coffee shop called Coffee in Love, and to the bamboo bridge I talked about before. My original idea was to make one video about that day and include my stories of visiting all three places. But I copied all the relevant raw video to my phone last night, and I was astonished to see how much there was. On that day, I shot 112 gigabytes of 4K video. It took two and a half hours just to copy the video from the hard drive to my smartphone. I started loading the raw video into my video editing program, and just the video from the bridge turned out to be one hour long. That’s crazy.
So, off the top of my head this morning, I’m thinking that I should divide those experiences up into at least two videos and maybe three. The problem with that is that I didn’t shoot that video with that plan in mind. So there won’t be any convenient points at which to divide the video. There will be no beginning and ending for the bridge visit or the coffee shop visit or the bamboo bridge visit. I have a beginning and an ending for the day, but not for the individual moments of that day. But I’ll figure something out. It’s just going to take time.
I had more technology adventures. I was forced to give up on PowerDirector. I could not get the program to work. I wasted so much time on it. It’s insane how often I’ve had to do this in my life. Nothing ever works for me. I will install a new program, and then, every time, I have to spend days trying to fix all the problems. You uninstall the program and reinstall it. You read all the help documents and you scour all the forums looking for answers. You take all these suggestions and try them out one by one and run tests each time to see if they worked. I’ve done this enough times that I’ve learned one thing: if there is a deep systemic problem like the one I’m experiencing, it can’t be fixed. It just can’t. You can spend hours implementing all the little fixes that the PowerDirector support department will suggest. They will say that you don’t have enough RAM available, so you have to close all other applications while running PowerDirector. They will say that you have to reduce the resolution of the video playback window. They will say this and they will say that. And you know deep down that none of this will work. But you have to go through the motions. And you do all this. And the program still won’t work.
Now I’m kicking myself for paying the full year. But perhaps I can get a refund. I’m fairly sure that I’m going to try. As I said, I already know that I will never be able to fix the problem. PowerDirector is a dead end for me. There’s no point in spending more time trying to find a solution. There isn’t one. These programs either work out of the box or they don’t. All the incremental changes you can make to improve performance won’t make a dent in the original big problem. There’s never a magic bullet, one setting change, that will fix the problem. If the editing program is laggy and it stutters and freezes and the audio is out of sync, nothing you can do will fix it.
An amusing aspect to these situations is that the company that sold you the product will always try to convince you that YOU are the problem. You did something wrong. There’s something wrong with your computer. It’s never their application that is the problem. And when I eventually write to them, I like to have a little bit of my own ammunition to bolster my argument and my complaint. And in this case, I decided to try out a completely new program. A friend of mine, a fellow YouTuber, has been recommending a program called Filmora. This program is in the same category as PowerDirector. It costs about the same, and it is designed for people like me – the prosumer – someone who isn’t a professional but who also isn’t a simple consumer. We don’t need the full power of Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro or even DaVinci Resolve. But the simplistic programs that the average person uses aren’t powerful enough. They don’t have the tools and features that we need. PowerDirector and Filmora and similar programs fit right into that sweet spot between them. It’s powerful enough to do what we need but not so powerful and so feature-rich that it is overwhelming.
Just to test Filmora, I downloaded the free version. And right out of the box, it worked flawlessly. It was such a relief. I created a video project and loaded the exact same video files that I was trying to edit in PowerDirector. And everything was perfect. The audio waveform matched the video and audio playback. The playhead moved smoothly across the screen. It was kind of majestic. The playhead in PowerDirector was jerky and erratic and would jump ahead crazily. It was really annoying and hard to work with. I really put Filmora through its paces, and it never caused even the smallest problem. Unfortunately, I was unable to test it with 4K video. I only have 1080p video loaded onto my MacBook. But that’s what I was also using with PowerDirector, and that program couldn’t even handle 1080p. Filmora chewed up that 1080p video effortlessly. I would love to test it with 4K video before buying the program, but the free version won’t accept 4K. You have to buy the premium package in order to do that. So if I want to use Filmora going forward, I have to take another chance and just buy it and see what happens. There’s no monthly plan for Filmora. You can buy the program outright for $80 US. Or you can get an annual subscription for $52.
I haven’t done a super-deep dive into Filmora, but I spent between two and three hours using it. And I didn’t come across a single problem or dealbreaker. In fact, I was pleased with nearly everything I saw and experienced. Having been burned by PowerDirector, I’m not going to rush into buying Filmora. I think I’m going to use the free version for a while. When you export a video with the free version, they put a Filmora watermark on the video so they get some advertising. But I can live with that for certain video projects. Maybe I will wait until I know for sure that I can get a refund from PowerDirector. And then I’ll feel better about spending money on Filmora.
I was very happy that Filmora worked so well. It was a relief. It gave some promise that eventually I will be able to locate a video editing program that suits my needs and will work on this frustrating MacBook. And I was able to include my Filmora experience in my email to PowerDirector. As I said, I like to be able to defend myself in those emails. I knew that the PowerDirector staff would just reply with the standard reply. They would just offer up all the advice to free up RAM on my laptop and things like that. Their entire approach will be to blame me and blame my laptop. But I can preempt that attack by telling them that DaVinci Resolve works well. And Filmora works perfectly and smoothly. No freezing. No lag. No stuttering. No syncing problems. All these other programs work on my laptop. And PowerDirector doesn’t.
I also watched another episode or two of Ocean Wreck Investigation. With my history of watching many similar shows from National Geographic and companies like that, the stories were familiar. I’d heard versions of them all before. But I still found them enjoyable. One episode focused on the Empress of Ireland. I guess it is the biggest peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history. Yet, occurring as it did right before the start of World War I, it has largely been forgotten. Another episode focused on famous battleships that were sunk, including the British Hood, the German Bismarck, and the Japanese Yamato. The theme of that episode was fascinating as it told the story of how air power essentially ended the era of the battleship. The battleship was a symbol of national power for quite some time. It was the ultimate weapon. But then airplane-based weaponry advanced to the point that battleships were extremely vulnerable and weren’t the awe-inspiring weapons they used to be.
And as far as pop culture goes, the only other thought on my mind is that I’ve been catching up on the YouTube videos of Itchy Boots. This channel is from a woman from the Netherlands named Noraly. She is a motorcycle vlogger, and she is somewhere in the middle of riding her motorcycle from South America to Alaska. I have an odd relationship with her experiences and her videos. I like them, obviously. I’m a sucker for anyone documenting an experience like that. And she is quite adventurous. Yet, her videos often bore me. There isn’t enough of that daily minutiae that I value so much. She focuses on the grand scenery and the adventure of her day. That’s what most people want on YouTube. But I want to know everything about the logistics of what she is doing. I want to see her packing up in the morning and unpacking at the end of the day. I want to hear about the struggles of finding places to stay and getting food to eat. I want to know how much things cost. I want the whole story. But she only tells the best bits. I want the nitty-gritty.
She also moves far too quickly. It’s impressive in a way. She will go through an intense and difficult day on her motorcycle. It’s the kind of day that can do you in, and you just collapse exhausted onto the bed in your room that night. And she does that. But she is awake early the next morning and just leaves for another day just like that one. And then another. And another. She’s tough. Yet, I want her to stay in that town. Explore the place. Get to know it. Spend some time there. She goes through a series of spectacular little mountain towns with incredible settings. But she spends no time in any of them. She just spends one night in the hotel and moves on.
She’s also very cagey about details of her trip. She will never mention the day or date. And that’s because her videos are months old. It takes her a long time to post the videos of her experiences. And she knows that a YouTube audience won’t like that. They like to think that what they are seeing in a video is happening right now. If she posts a video from Colombia, her audience likes to believe that she is in Colombia. But I’m like a detective with these videos, and I’m pretty sure that she was in Colombia last October or November, months ago. Her audience thinks she is in Colombia having those adventures, but she’s already in Mexico or even in the United States. Or she flew back to the Netherlands. Who knows? So she is very careful to never include anything in her videos that could give away when something is happening.